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Comment Re:It's not a next-gen xbox console (Score 1) 40

If they are on the PC Game Pass, and you are a current subscriber to it, then yes.

For me the software side to the Xbox Ally and Ally X are much more interesting than the whole product itself. I will be very interested to see experts get a hold of the OS image — looking closely at the changes and how it operates differently to BAU Win11.

Assuming that the Armory Crate software is not too integrated into the OS, I'd like to see attempts at getting the OS running on desktop PC hardware.

Comment Private Equity's New Target: Private Equity Itself (Score 2) 73

"60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to AI disruption."

Super optimistic or deeply cynical take from Robert F. Smith.

It sounds like he thinks that AI is either "primed and ready to make solid decisions and not hallucinate bankrupt Private Equity firms", or "that 60% of the people in Private Equity are so useless that hallucinating LLMs can replace them".

Probably more thinking of keeping more of the money "in-house" with the wealth class as it seems like Private Equity can only fail upwards.

Comment Re:Awesome! (Score 2) 245

You don't have to 100% destroy the planes to give Ukraine breathing space. You don't even need to completely wreck a single plane. Even minor repairable damage to some of the planes could be a significant boost to Ukraine, and still a great victory in terms of cost/benefit (plus no casualties on Ukraine's side).

Wikipedia states Russia has 55 Tupolev Tu-95 planes in service as of 2020. If the 4 "irrecoverable planes" are Tu-95 planes, that'd be a near 10% reduction in their in service Tu-95 planes. Similar sort of percentage if any of the planes are Tu-22Ms.

If there are limited number of maintenance facilities available for the Tu-95 or Tu-22M planes (and I think that is a valid assumption) then potentially most of the damaged planes could be out of commission for some time.

Every hour of flight time will require many more hours of downtime for maintenance. Less usable planes, and a limited number of maintenance capacity, means less planes that they field at any singular time. The planes not considered "irrecoverable " might require years before they are air worthy again. Might require parts no longer available (but still "recoverable"). Or they might never be repaired due to the cost, and are mothballed or cannibalised for parts

Also less planes able to be used means more flight time on each plane in service. The life span of the currently remaining planes will be shorter.I could not find any quote for the Tu-95 or Tu-22M for maintenance time per fight time, but I am guessing its high (old Soviet era planes), in the 10-20 range for hours of maintenance per single hour of flight time. I did see a note somewhere that the NK-12MP engines in the Tu-95 have a maximum service capacity of 200 flight hours per year. Cutting corners on maintenance might mean a higher rate of faults developing, limited effectiveness in combat capacity, etc.

And if we are talking of symbolism, the drone attack absolutely embarrassed Putin/Russia. Full on "pants pulled down and everyone laughed at Putin's choice of underwear" levels of embarrassment.

Comment Re:I could see a day that SteamOS runs natively .. (Score 1) 53

I see that pathway of potential futures as a likely option, or I am probably being hopeful.

What I really see as inevitable (if not already here) is that Windows will annoy me so much (maybe with a touch of computer hardware locking itself down into integrated SoCs with little to no user customisation of the hardware) that I'll ditch Windows and go GNU/Linux. If future PC hardware essentially goes the Apple Silicone route, which would kill a lot of the fun my building/owning a gaming PC, I'd probably stay on older PC hardware (and would need to go GNU/Linux).

I want to see SteamOS grow and flourish. More options for is good, and Valve's contributions to GNU/Linux can only be see as a positive (well Stallman would likely disagree).

Comment Re:Delaying Release Why? (Score 1) 38

The "5070 = 4090" stuff thaT Nvidia talked up at the reveal have some very large caveats: loads of multiframe generation and in very specific games and settings for the games.

If you take a 4090 and a 5070 and throw a huge sample of different use cases by many different people, the "this is effectively like a 4090 for performance" responses will be very very smaller compared to the other responses.

Comment Re:"No" [But better financial models could?] (Score 2) 69

Maybe that is correct. I didn't bother reading the whole article, though I did skim read it, but I didn't really think that I could add more to that "no" response without really diving deep into what Cory wrote, and then mull it over. I have Cory in my RSS feeds, but I haven't caught up on my backlog of his writings.

Maybe respond after a few days. Not because I want to come off as intellectual, but more from a fear of not looking like an idiot.

IMO there is too much inertia for people ("users" or "the product" depending on one's viewpoint) for changing platforms, sop trying to reason with the masses for making a change would be extremely difficult.

Even if you could have a government (mostly with decent politicians) try to make changes, there are still far too many political people out there too cozy with corporate interests. Or other groups' interests.

A local example:

When my country (NZ) had a referendum over legalising cannabis alllll sorts of interest groups got involved in dropping money to push ads and astroturfing for the "No". Church of Scientology and American anti-cannabis lobby groups were behind a lot of the "no" campaigns, and the misinformation that the country got bombarded with.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/nation...

Any major change in laws regarding regulating businesses would likely attract the same level of interest groups (and from overseas). The soon-to-be Deputy Prime Minister in our current government is the leader of the political party heavily associated with the Atlas Network. I am certain that the current government would never try to reign in businesses (National and Act parties are right-wing parties) and if a Labour-led (center left party maybe?) government tried to, the NZ Tax Payers' Union (a pressure group with ties with Atlas Network) would drop a tonne of corporate donation money for full page newspaper ads, etc, and a lot of misinformation online.

https://thestandard.org.nz/dav...

I think that at the current rate, no simple to moderate level fix is possible. The system needs a massive shock in order for any positive change to happen (when it's getting fixed).

Comment Possibly, kind of... (Score 1) 522

From a certain point-of-view it is possible that ICE cars could get generally harder to use in a geographic area if the number of EV cars reach X%, in the term of getting fuel for the ICE car.

The "gas station" as we know it is newer than ICE cars, so people had to get their gas/petrol from somewhere. "The first purpose-built, drive-up gas station opened in 1913", and there were fuel pumps before this point. I have read that in America gas was purchased at pharmacies in the 1800s (possibly well into 1900s in more remote areas?). This was similar in New Zealand, where benzine ("petrol") was sold in 4 gallon tins from "blacksmiths, grocers, country stores, and stock and station agents".

If the demand drops enough, then a return to the "old days" might start to happen in some areas (though some places in the world have always been like this even today).

If the gas station industry in USA is anything like petrol stations are in NZ, then there is an apparent thin margin of profit that the operators of the stations can operate on. Presumably the fatter margins are being made by the "the big boys" further up the vertical. Selling snacks/drinks/etc is a way of diversifying the revenue made by the station.

The following assumes that gas stations do not pivot more into EV charging, or that even if they do that it is not enough to keep at current revenue/profit levels:

If the number of ICE cars in an area drops, then some gas stations will close up shop first as the revenue dips. Then there will be larger "no gas zones" — probably further away from the well-travelled roads/highways where you might only find a gas/petrol station near a town. If it gets any worse then highways could start to see gas stations spread out further and further.

All of a sudden "range anxiety" that EV car owners could start to apply for gas station coverage in areas. Even if there is a demand, if there is not enough of demand, then the market cannot fully address that demand.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 55

This is a wild ass guess: MS/Linus/etc are involved to get the hardware and software people talking more amongst each other.

The Win 11 24H2 update affecting Ryzen CPU performance, and it being released after the launch of the first Ryzen 9000 CPUs, is all the evidence required why there is a real value in discussion between parties in the x86 space (both hardware and software).

Comment Re:Not the only country (Score 1) 54

The current president of South Korean actively courted the anti-feminist vote for the 2022 election, and his government didn't stop there.

There is a gender-war occurring in Korea right now. Even being suspected of being a feminist could cause a bunch of angry creepy men to make a women a target for online abuse/harassment.

https://www.vice.com/en/articl...

Comment Re:What about the oxygen? (Score 1) 38

Well it is beyond my first year chemistry uni courses — I majored into biology so I never didn't touch any chemistry after first year except for biochemistry.

There may be some areas of the moon with higher levels of illumination from the sun (Lunar South Pole, etc?) so solar might be possible but I would wager "Atomic power on the Moon, LETS GO!!!!!" will be written on the margins in the paper. Bootstrapping entire ecosystem to keep people living on the moon as a semi-permanent would require an insane level of power to brute-force your way, and even then it'd bankrupt any space programme even if there was some radical breakthrough in getting stuff up to orbit (and then to the Moon).

I wouldn't even be able to fathom the time/resource cost to create usable soil on the Moon.

Hmm... CO2 could be a source of some of the oxygen. Until there was self-sustaining base biosphere for growing food/oxygen plants (or algae?), they'd need to do something about the CO2.

Comment "The Perfection Trap" (Score 1) 80

As a counter point: the opposite is also true.

Striving for perfection can also be a trap i.e. diminshing returns to go from "good enough" to "this is perfect" can sometimes not be worth it.

To use a similar example to the essay: a student writing an essay (but having to juggle their workload) i.e. a student with an essay due in three weeks but also got another essay due in four weeks. Do you spend three weeks trying to "perfect" the first essay, and then only spend a single week for the second essay? (No, unless you were very confident or lacking any care for 2nd one). What if you have a part-time job, and all the regular time required for lectures/labs/etc?

Sometimes a project/essay/assignment is not worth the cost of time.

If you knew you should be able to get a "B" for the 1st essay, with 30 hours of research of writing, and were confident that you could probably get an "A" with 50 hours, would it be worth it? (depends on the student and their current time load) How about if a student was confident that they could "barely scrape by with a pass" with 10 hours?

If a student was "always aiming for the best grades possible" and putting in the time required to likely get that, you need to have very good time management skills, and get very good at predicting when you "should not worry about that A" early ahead to not sink too much time into one specific task at the expense of another.

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